STOP APOLOGIZING, OBAMA

The violent attacks on U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist strike against America, deserve full investigation. Protecting diplomatic personnel around the world is a basic responsibility of our government, and U.S. officials knew protests, at the least, were coming. They were promoted by various parties via social media, allegedly to display anger over the online release of a U.S.-made movie depicting the Prophet Muhammad in blasphemous fashion.

But CNN reported Wednesday that U.S. officials believe the protest in Benghazi, Libya, may have been a diversion to allow al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists to attack the consulate there with rocket-propelled grenades, killing four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who played a heroic role last year in working with NATO to help the Libyan people oust ruthless dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported (see his column on the opposite page) that evidence indicated that the controversy over the blasphemous movie was only a cover for protest organizers who wanted to send an anti-American message and to rattle the more pragmatic Muslims in control of the Egyptian and Libyan governments.

When the dust clears and more is known, the U.S. needs to bring to justice those responsible for the killings of four Americans. We also need an explanation from Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whose government receives more than $1 billion in annual U.S. aid, as to why Egyptian security forces didn’t help quell the Cairo protest before the embassy had to be evacuated.

But in the larger picture, what we most need is for the Obama administration to stop accepting the vapid argument that displays of Western “Islamophobia” by individuals can ever be blamed for Islamist violence against Western governments or their citizens. We need to stop apologizing for “incitement,” as the U.S. embassy in Cairo did early Tuesday when it expressed sympathy for those angered by the obscure anti-Islam film. Instead, we need to say the Western tradition of free speech includes offensive speech, and nations that deny basic rights to half their population – women – and often don’t protect religious minorities have no standing to lecture Western democracies built on individual freedom when individuals exercise that freedom.

There’s also this often-ignored reality: As Ignatius notes, the protest mobs didn’t spontaneously gather. They were incited from within. The same was true with the Islamist mobs that attacked Danes and symbols of Denmark around the world in 2006 after Muslim clerics repeatedly publicized blasphemous but obscure Danish cartoons.

Given the freewheeling discourse in Western nations, there always will be something that Islamist leaders can seize on to rile up extremists and the disaffected. Once that is understood, the idea of apologizing for Western “incitement” as mobs gather around our embassies is self-evidently foolish.

As we seek justice for the four Americans killed in Benghazi and demand answers from the Morsi government, we must continue to support the “Arab spring.” But the next time a cleric or politician in an Islamic nation complains about Western blasphemy, our response shouldn’t be to apologize. It should be to say that nation should aspire to be a place where people are free to say what they want without fear of violent retribution. An “Arab spring” that replaces corrupt secular dictatorships with rigid religious autocracies would be a giant letdown – even if those autocracies were voted into power.